Worker tells of smuggled tools, oral sex
PLATTSBURGH, N .Y. •A small favour for a killer’s daughter. A stolen kiss and a furtive sexual encounter. And ultimately, sneaking tools past guards for use in an audacious escape from a maximum-security prison.
Such were the moments that marked Joyce Mitchell’s evolution from a workaday prison employee to a lovestruck and fully aware accomplice, as outlined in three statements Mitchell made last month to investigators.
Mitchell, 51, pleaded guilty Tuesday to assisting Richard Matt and David Sweat, two convicted murderers, in their elaborate breakout last month from the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y. With the help of tools smuggled in by Mitchell, the convicts sawed through their cell walls and cut their way in and out of a steam pipe, finally emerging in the town.
She did not feel she could stop, Mitchell said, adding, “They were getting out and we were all going to be together.”
The escape set off a threeweek manhunt before Matt was shot and killed on June 26 and Sweat was shot and captured on June 28.
The central question of what drove Mitchell, a softspoken married woman, to help the prisoners has only now been answered.
Her statements sketch a vivid chronology of how Mitchell, a supervisor in the prison’s tailor shop, came to commit her crimes by falling for a prisoner, eventually succumbing to the seemingly irresistible momentum and dark excitement of the escape.
Mitchell was meant to be the getaway driver. She was to meet the two men at midnight near the prison’s powerhouse, but she suffered a panic attack and did not show up. That panic may have been caused by threats made by the two men directed at Mitchell’s husband, Lyle, whom the inmates nicknamed “the Glitch,” and whom they planned to drug and murder. “Inmate Matt was going to kill ‘the Glitch,’” Mitchell said.
“Inmate Matt and I got along well,” Mitchell told investigators a day after he and Sweat were discovered missing. “We talked every day and he treated me with respect and was nice to me. He made me feel special.”
Matt and Sweat worked in the prison’s tailor shop, although Sweat had been separated from Mitchell in September after prison officials suspected “an inappropriate relationship.” Mitchell, however, denied having romantic feelings for Sweat. Matt, though — who had killed two men — was different. Last fall, Mitchell began doing errands for him.
But the requests took a more suspicious turn, as Matt asked Mitchell to buy two pairs of spectacles, equipped with lights, which the two men apparently used as they worked at nights, unnoticed.
The relationship and plot intensified. In late April, Mitchell said, Matt suddenly “grabbed me and kissed me” with an open mouth. Shortly after that, he asked for a screwdriver bit, which Mitchell bought and gave him. In May, Matt asked for oral sex, and Mitchell consented.
Mitchell also said that she took partially nude photos for Sweat and wrote him provocative notes, but that she did not have sexual contact with him.
Mitchell also began making phone calls for Matt, disguising her identity by pretending to be a hospital employee. The point of those calls was not clear, but Mitchell soon learned that the men had chosen a day to break out: June 5.
“He told me that they were getting out tonight and we were all going to be together,” she said. “He told me to pick them up in Dannemora.”
But Mitchell’s resolve weakened. By 10 p.m. she was in a hospital emergency room; she later was admitted, leaving Matt and Sweat — on the loose — to fend for themselves.
She faces up to seven years in prison.